


Complex Wiring

by andthelightbulbclicks



Series: The 100 Chopped Challenge [3]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - The Lunar Chronicles Fusion, Chopped Madness, Cyborgs, F/M, Partners in Crime, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:14:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23387194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andthelightbulbclicks/pseuds/andthelightbulbclicks
Summary: According to the Commonwealth of Arkadian, cyborgs have been wiped out from the nation for years, any scientists willing to do the surgeries arrested or worse.John Murphy, whose primary goal in life is to be a general nuisance to the guards in his crummy village, has no reason to believe otherwise.That is, until he unexpectedly meets a group of cyborgs in hiding who are looking for "the Cockroach" to do a job for them.
Relationships: John Murphy/Raven Reyes
Series: The 100 Chopped Challenge [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1706239
Comments: 14
Kudos: 28
Collections: Chopped Madness





	Complex Wiring

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Round 2 of [Chopped Madness](https://chopped100challenge.tumblr.com/):
> 
>  **Character** : John Murphy  
>  **Theme** : Dystopia  
>  **Partners in Crime** : Murven :)  
>  **Bed Sharing** : Murven :) :)
> 
> This is inspired by/ _very_ loosely based off of _Cinder_ by Marissa Meyer. If you haven't read The Lunar Chronicles series, I HIGHLY recommend it! It's one of my all-time faves!!

Murphy can feel her eyes on him.

The mechanic, that is.

She’s a newer addition to the booths that make up the dingy market in the crappy village that Murphy calls home. 

The market’s pathetic enough that the Arkadian guards won’t put the effort into shutting it down, but it doesn’t stop them from barreling through every weekend to help themselves to whichever booths they choose.

And every day for the past few weeks, as Murphy makes his daily stroll through the broken village, he can feel her watching him.

She’ll turn her head the moment he catches her looking as he walks by Vera’s fruit booth right next door to it.

“Well if it isn’t the Cockroach.”

Murphy stops his stroll down the dusty street, turning in the direction of McCreary’s voice. He and his fellow Arkadian guards are coming down the adjacent street on their Rover, no doubt full of goods from booths they’ve helped themselves to. 

“Well if it isn’t the asshole guards,” he responds in kind, turning to them as the Rover slows and McCreary hops out. “Which unsuspecting booths are you here to steal and plunder from this weekend?”

“You would know given the amount of stealing and plundering you’ve done,” McCreary shoots back, his usual bait, even as he walks right past Murphy and heads towards Vera’s booth.

Murphy watches as Vera realizes it as well, her posture going rigid the closer McCreary gets.

“Ah,” Murphy says, hoping to pull McCreary’s attention from his intended target. “You always refer to my supposed thievery, and yet, I’ve still yet to be arrested for such accusations.” When that does nothing to catch his attention, Murphy takes it a step further. “I’m starting to think you’re just bad at your job, McCreary.”

He watches as McCreary pauses in his steps, no more than a few feet away from Vera’s booth.

McCreary’s boots crunch in the dirt as they twist to face Murphy. Two steps, and he’s right in front of Murphy, swinging his fist and connecting right with the left side of Murphy’s face. 

Murphy’s head jerks to the side with the force, turning his head back towards McCreary with a smirk gracing his lips.

“That a confession?” McCreary whispers menacingly from where he stands, the busy sounds of the market going silent as they watch the confrontation unfold.

Murphy spits in the dirt at McCreary’s feet, blood mixing into dry dirt. 

McCreary looks down, then back up at Murphy with a sneer. “I’d be careful there, Cockroach. You might just get the wrong person angry.”

Murphy swipes his face, blood smearing onto his hand before responding. “I’m not worth the effort.”

“The first thing you’ve been right about yet,” McCreary says, he turns back towards the Rover. “Until next weekend, everyone!” He yells to all of the listening ears surrounding them as he hops up onto the side of the Rover, grabbing a part of the roof and hanging casually from the side.

Murphy holds his stare as McCreary looks back at him with a mock salute right before the Rover drives off.

The silence lingers for another few minutes after the vehicle drives out of sight before the normal rustle and bustle of the crowd takes over again.

“Oh John,” Vera scolds, walking up to his side and taking his face in her hands.

Her fingers gently probe where McCreary had landed the punch, pressing on the tender spot and making Murphy wince.

Vera tuts at his reaction. “You should’ve just let him take what he wanted from me,” she tells him as she pushes him along towards the entrance to her booth.

“But where’s the fun in that?” He asks with a smirk, getting the eye roll he expected.

“One of these days, John Murphy, you’re going to get yourself into trouble you can’t get yourself out of,” she warns, even as she moves to get him a wet rag to clean his face. She grabs an apple from her table and tosses it to him from where she stands. “For your troubles.”

He catches it with one hand, bringing it to his mouth to take an exaggerated bite.

It makes Vera let out a sigh as she shakes her head, even as she comes back over to tend to him.

She continues chastising him as she does it, but Murphy’s attention is too focused on the booth next door, where he expects to find the mechanic watching him again, but finds nobody at all.

* * *

The mechanic is back the next day, her booth busy keeping her focused on her work, allowing Murphy to do the watching this time.

She’s not what he’d expect for a mechanic, with her slim figure and long, brown hair, but she seems to know what she’s doing. 

“If you think she’s pretty, you should just go talk to her,” Vera cuts into his thoughts from where she stands next to him in her booth. She had said she needed help carrying the heavy crates of fruit, and somehow tricked him into sticking around. 

“That’s not why I’m looking at her,” Murphy answers, keeping his gaze on the mechanic.

“Oh?” Vera says, busying herself with serving a customer.

“She’s always watching me around the village,” he explains.

“Well maybe she thinks _you’re_ pretty,” she retorts.

Murphy snorts in response. “Of course she thinks I’m pretty.”

Vera shakes her head in amusement.

Maybe the mechanic _does_ think he’s pretty, because as soon as he’s helped Vera load her remaining fruit into her cart and sent her on her way, he turns around to find the mechanic casually leaning against a beam with her arms crossed. 

“You’re to get creepy,” he tells her.

“You’re the Cockroach?” She asks, ignoring his comment.

“Uh, yeah,” he says, confusion evident in his response. “I normally go by Murphy.”

He watches as she nods to herself, almost like she’s talking herself into something. “I’m Raven Reyes,” she tells him, holding her hand out to him.

He shakes it, even as he finds himself squinting at her suspiciously.

“Okay…”

“I need you to come with me,” she cuts in abruptly, straightening herself out from where she had been leaning and leaving the booths to start walking down the abandoned street without further explanation.

Murphy’s left standing there in confusion. “What the fuck?” He whispers to himself, even as he finds himself moving to follow her.

“You know,” he says once he’s caught up with her, “this is the weirdest foreplay I’ve done in a while.”

Her only response is a roll of her eyes as she makes an abrupt turn down one of the side alleys. He watches as her eyes skitter around them, almost like she’s making sure they’re not being followed.

Murphy’s starting to think maybe he shouldn’t be following the crazy mechanic down the abandoned alleyway in the dark of night.

But he keeps going anyways.

She turns down another alleyway, and another, and another, until Murphy’s not sure where the hell they are even though he’s lived in this village for his entire life.

Finally, she stops at the bottom of a flight of rickety wooden stairs that look like they could collapse any moment and starts climbing them with determination. Still, Murphy follows as they stand at the top on a wooden platform, and Raven does another glance around before knocking on the door in front of them in a very specific pattern.

Silence follows as he listens for sound on the other side. He hears nothing, but the door opens just a crack.

“It’s me,” Raven says to the hidden figure on the other side. “I have the Cockroach.”

The door swings open just wide enough to allow Raven to walk in, and when Murphy doesn’t immediately follow, for her to reach out and drag him in too by the front of his shirt. 

Suddenly, Murphy’s wondering if he’s becoming some cult sacrifice as he looks around to find a male and female standing next to Raven in the empty room with fierce glares fixed on him.

“ _This_ is him?” The woman asks, eyeing Murphy up and down, seemingly unimpressed with what she finds.

The man, who’s wearing tinted sunglasses, seems to agree with her statement as he purses his lips. “You sure?”

Raven scoffs. “The guard called him it yesterday.”

“Okay,” Murphy interrupts, because he’s clearly way in over his head here. “Anyone want to tell me what the fuck his going on? Because if not–”

“Would you all shut the fuck up?” A voice hisses quietly from a doorway Murphy hadn’t even noticed until now. “She’s trying to sleep,” another guy with curly hair says from the entrance to another room as he glares daggers at Raven and the other two strangers.

To their credit, they all look guilty at his words, which only confuses Murphy more. 

It’s then that he hears harsh coughing from that other room, and the curly-haired man is rushing back into the room instantly with the other three following right behind him.

Murphy’s left standing in the first room by himself, completely lost in what is happening.

He could leave right now – just walk right out the door while they’re distracted. 

Instead, he finds himself stupidly following the four strangers into the mysterious second room.

Inside, he finds the four of them surrounding a bed where a fifth person lies, hacking so hard her body shakes with it as the guy who yelled strokes back the woman’s blonde hair. Murphy watches as he whispers soothing words to her, trying to calm the coughs in between by tilting a cup to her lips.

Murphy watches her hands move to grasp the cup, squinting as he steps nearer and gets a closer look at one of her hands.

It’s metal.

He looks closer at the woman, noting how the metal melds seamlessly with her arm, and how there’s patches of metal peeking out from the collar of her shirt across her neck, all the way up the right side of her face.

“She’s a cyborg,” Murphy blurts out in surprise, mouth apparently working faster than his brain.

All five sets of eyes turn to him instantly, as if they forgot he was there.

“You got a problem with that?” The fierce girl from the first room growls at him, her gloved fists clenching as she glares at him.

Murphy raises his hands up, taking a step back from where he has their full attention. “No problem at all,” he explains truthfully, even as he’s trying to wrap his head around it. “Just thought they were all dead.”

Cyborgs are people the Commonwealth of Arkadian would like to forget existed for some reason or other. Murphy’s not sure why or how, but since the new leadership took control, cyborgs have become more of a myth than anything else. Rumor is that Emperor Jaha had his guards arrest any doctors willing to perform the life-saving cybernetic surgeries, and had any cyborg living in the Commonwealth killed. 

But this all happened before Murphy was even born. This girl is no older than him, and very clearly had the surgery illegally.

“Yeah,” Raven says, pulling him from his train of thought, “well now you can say you’ve seen four.”

That catches Murphy’s attention as he eyes the people in the room.

“Four?” He repeats.

The guy with the glasses lifts the shades so that they rest atop his shaved head, revealing mismatched eyes – one human, one mechanical. “Name’s Miller. 2.97 percent,” he says with a wink of the mechanical eye, before pulling the glasses back down over his eyes.

Murphy looks to the fiery girl as she pulls off one glove, and then the other, to reveal ten metal fingers attached to fleshy palms. “Octavia. 9.51 percent,” she tells him with a smirk as she wiggles her fingers at him. 

Next, Murphy’s eyes fall on Raven, who tugs her left pant leg up slightly to reveal the metal underneath. “This baby goes all the way up past my knee,” she explains, patting it fondly. “15.42 percent,” she adds on after the fact. 

Each of them says the percentages proudly, almost like they’re badges to be worn. Murphy can only assume each number represents how much of them is metal.

“Clarke,” the girl on the bed manages to gasp out. “21.99 percent,” she says on a weak voice.

“Alright,” Murphy says as he tries wrapping his head around the fact that cyborgs still exist. 

It’s just that now they’re hiding it.

“And what about you?” Murphy asks the guy who hasn’t looked away from Clarke.

At that, Octavia laughs. “Bellamy’s 100 percent human. He’s just got a cyborg sister and is in love with one.”

The guy, _Bellamy_ , rolls his eyes at her.

“Well,” Murphy interrupts, “while this is fascinating and all, I’m having a hard time understanding why you’re telling me.”

His words seem to sober them as they all glance at one another before Raven finally speaks up. “We’re looking for someone to complete a job, and your name popped up.”

That, if nothing else has so far, tells Murphy it’s time to leave.

“I don’t do that anymore,” he tells them firmly.

“You mean you stopped stealing from the Commonwealth?” Miller asks challengingly.

“I mean I stopped sneaking into the city after the last time nearly got me killed.”

Because it started with Murphy breaking into the city’s primary medical clinic to steal medicine for his father up until he died. Word got around that he could get in and out undetected, and the Cockroach was born with each successful swipe he made across the city. 

“So, what,” Raven asks with what Murphy thinks might be anger. “You’re on the straight and narrow now? Because I think those Arkadian guards from yesterday might disagree.”

“That’s because those assholes can never trace it back to me,” he shoots back.

“Which is why you’re perfect for what we need,” she throws back at him.

Murphy finds his voice raising with each back and forth. “Yeah? And what exactly do you need?”

“Medicine,” is the weak response Clarke gives from the bed, pulling Murphy’s attention back to her. “The Commonwealth released a virus targeting the hidden cyborgs,” she explains. “For humans, it passes through as nothing more than a cold that they can get medicine for. But for cyborgs–”

She’s cut off by another cough.

“For cyborgs,” Raven continues for her, “it tricks our metal parts into attacking our human parts until it kills us.”

Murphy thinks about the notification everyone received about the new illness traveling around, how they should head to the primary medical clinic in the city if they were to find themselves ill.

“You can’t pass as human and go to the clinic?” Murphy asks Clarke.

She shakes her head. “They’ll see what I am before I even get close to it.”

“And what about you guys?” He directs at Raven, Octavia, and Miller. “They wouldn’t be able to tell as easily with you.”

“Except that they’d be looking to scan ID chips that we don’t have,” Miller explains. 

At that, Murphy unconsciously rubs his own wrist where his ID chip lays. “How’d you manage that?”

“The cybernetic scientists who do our surgeries remove them during the operations,” Raven explains.

“And what about you?” He directs the question to Bellamy. “Can’t you pretend you’re sick and get the antidote?”

The look of anguish on Bellamy’s face tells Murphy all he needs to know. That Bellamy tried for the woman he loves. That he failed her.

Murphy sighs, looking back at Raven. “So what, I sneak in, steal the antidote, bring it back?”

Honestly, it’s a doable task, one he did countless times for his dad while he was alive.

Raven shakes her head. “ _We_ sneak in and get the antidote.”

Murphy’s brain short circuits at that. “We who?”

At that, Raven rolls her eyes. “I’m going with you.” Murphy opens his mouth to protest, but she stops him. “They’ve updated security. You need me to get you in, and I need you to get me to the right room.”

Again, Murphy opens his mouth to argue, only to be cut off by Clarke’s sharp coughs. He watches as Bellamy strokes her hair, tucking the sweaty strands behind her ears.

He turns to look at Miller, Octavia, and Raven standing around the room with identical looks of worry etched across their faces.

Raven’s eyes meet his again. “ _Please_.”

They’re just trying to save their friend. All eyes are on him again as they wait for his response. 

“Ah, what the hell,” he says with a shrug of his shoulders.

At his words, there’s a collective sigh of relief across the room.

Murphy, however, keeps his eyes on Raven. She nods once, eyes staying locked with his. “Then we’ll leave first thing in the morning,” she states, before turning and leaving the room.

* * *

At the crack of dawn the next day, Raven’s waking Murphy up from where he dozed off on the ground of their shitty hideout. 

He rolls onto his back, glaring at her as she stands over him.

“How far is it to the city from here?” She asks him, cutting straight to business. 

Murphy squeezes his eyes closed against the light. “Used to take me four days by foot. I think McCreary and his meatheads do it in two when they go into the city. So unless you have a Rover hidden somewhere...”

He opens his eyes back up to see her looking down at him with a satisfied smirk on her lips. “Better.”

“Fuck,” is the only response he has to that.

Better, apparently means that instead of a four-wheeled vehicle, she’s got a two-wheeled death machine.

“Oh don’t be such a baby,” she tells him after her big reveal.

Murphy scoffs at the teasing glint in Raven’s eyes as Miller and Octavia watch on in amusement. She swings her leg over the motorcycle and revs it before turning towards Murphy again.

“You coming?” She tosses a helmet at him that he catches square in the stomach.

He grumbles curses through the entire process of sliding in behind her on the blasted thing, wrapping his arms around her waist tightly.

They both look to their farewell party of two, who now have equally somber looks on their faces.

“Hurry,” is Octavia’s parting remark as Raven slides the visor down on her helmet and hits the gas.

* * *

They drive through the day, only stopping when necessary until they hit the shady inn at night that Murphy used to lodge in when still picking up jobs in the city.

They agreed they should stop if only to make sure they can get to the city by tomorrow night and head straight to the clinic. 

Like always, no questions are asked as Murphy pays the credits for their room. They walk into the only one available – a single.

Murphy immediately plops down on the bed, groaning at the luxury of a bed after sleeping on the ground the previous night. He’d probably be able to doze off then and there if he couldn’t feel Raven staring at him from the foot of the bed.

He peeks an eye open to find the first look of uncertainty he’s seen from her. “I’ll, um– I’ll sleep on the floor,” she tells him, pointing to the gap of space in front of the bed.

At that, he opens his other eye to fully look at her. She’s _hesitant_. A word he has not yet aligned with Raven Reyes.

“Don’t be stupid,” he tells her, scooting over to one side of the bed, “there’s more than enough room for both of us.”

Surprise stretches across her face, eyeing him carefully.

“You really don’t care, do you?”

He feels his brow furrow at her words. “Care about what?”

Raven chuckles softly, shaking her head. “That I’m a cyborg.”

“Why should I care about that?”

“Because pretty much everyone else does,” she answers simply.

Her words have an unexpected wave of sadness hitting him as he watches her sit on the corner of the bed.

“The Commonwealth has made us out to be these fearful creatures,” she explains as she looks down at her hands. “Clarke, Miller, and I were all saved by the same cybernetic scientist, Sinclair. He risks his life daily to save the lives of those who need it.”

She continues playing with her fingers as she keeps talking.

“It’s hard for Clarke to conceal her metal, so she has to hide. We travel at night, but we can’t settle anywhere for too. We met Bellamy and Octavia a few years back. It was our longest stay in one spot, until we almost got caught. We’ve been moving until Clarke got sick.” 

“Well,” he says while patting the open space next to him. “It sounds like you could use a good night’s rest.”

Her smile is softer this time as she crawls up the bed to lay down against the pillow. She’s turned on her side facing Murphy, so he mirrors her position. “Thank you,” she says quietly, eyes raking over his face. “I was told you’re a good person.”

The words hit deep. “By who?” He asks curiously, voice wavering despite his best efforts.

Raven’s eyes are closed, but she still smiles. “Vera.”

Murphy chuckles. “Well there’s no reason to thank me. And Vera doesn’t know me.”

“I think she does,” Raven hums. “There’s not many people who would do what you did for her.” She reaches over to tentatively trace a finger over the purpled bruise on his face.

Murphy feels his cheeks flush at the touch and her words, hoping that it’s too dark for her to see.

His discomfort at her compliments must be obvious, because she mercifully changes the subject.

“It was my job as a mechanic that caused my accident,” she says, retreating her hand back and rolling over into her back, staring up at the inn’s ceiling.

Murphy rolls onto his back as well, but keeps his head turned towards her. “Being a mechanic caused your cyborg-ness?”

It draws a laugh from her, just like he hoped it would. “The Rover that I was working on did when it fell on top of me and shattered my left leg to pieces.”

Murphy can’t help but think this might be the first time she’s talked about it with how her hands wring the bed sheets.

“I love the little family that I’ve made,” she goes on. “I just want us to be able to live our lives without all the danger. To be happy together.”

“That sounds nice,” Murphy says, the wistfulness in his tone obvious. 

“Yeah,” Raven says, covering a yawn, “it really does.”

* * *

Murphy wakes up before Raven the next morning, and is able to appreciate her resting comfortably for all of a minute before she’s opening her eyes and getting out of bed to gather their things. 

At dusk, they arrive right at the city’s edge and hide the motorcycle in the surrounding woods so as not to attract unnecessary attention to themselves. 

By nightfall, they’re making the rest of the journey on foot as Murphy leads the familiar route to the medical clinic. They sneak under the broken chain link fence they still haven’t realized is broken, and slip into one of the building’s back doors.

They slip on face masks and scrubs that they find so that they can blend in with the other medical staff filtering through the building. 

It’s almost routine at this point up – passing by workers without issue, moving through the halls without drawing suspicion, Raven following him wordlessly as she trusts him to guide them.

He brings her to the security room where she does something he can’t even begin to understand on the computers to make the cameras malfunction, and then they’re heading towards the room that stores the medicine.

Unsurprisingly, it’s locked.

It’s a new high-tech lock from what Murphy can tell, and his handy lock picking tools are going to be no match for it.

His mind is just starting to race with what their next step is going to be when Raven bends over and starts rolling up the scrub and pant of her metal leg until her entire silver calf is revealed. 

“What are you _doing_?” Murphy asks in bewilderment through his mask, glancing down both ends of the hallway to make sure nobody’s coming. He can only see her eyes when he looks back at her, but she’s got a look of determination on her face as she analyzes the lock system again before pressing something on her calf that has a hidden cavity popping open.

“Holy fuck,” Murphy mutters as he watches her pull out a screwdriver from the compartment that she immediately starts using on the lock pad. “Your leg has storage,” he observes uselessly.

“It does,” she confirms, never taking her eyes off of the fiddling she’s doing with the keypad. Another moment passes before the door clicks and is swinging open. He can’t see it through the mask, but he knows she’s smirking at him.

“You’re incredible,” he says in admiration as he watches her replace the screwdriver in her calf and seal the cavity back up. She rolls her pant leg back down before straightening back up and lifting an eyebrow at him.

He thinks she might be blushing under her mask.

Once inside, the urgency is back as they spread out across the room looking for the antidote. It doesn’t take long before Murphy’s opening one of the cabinets to finding vials labeled as the cure. There’s row upon row of it, with boxes of syringes right next to them, and a flare of anger erupts inside Murphy at the thought that this is being held back from people who need it because the Commonwealth wants them dead.

People are dying from something that can be cured.

Raven’s already reaching over him to grab one of the vials and syringes and wrapping them in some gauze that she found before rolling her pant leg back up to store the medicine safely in her leg. 

“Okay, we got what we need,” she says, tugging on his arm as he continues staring at the countless cases of antidote. “We need to get out of here before somebody sees us.”

Murphy stands there, staring at the vials.

“What if we took more?”

It breaks the one rule Murphy made when he started this – get what you need, _only_ what you need, and get out.

Raven’s looking at him like she didn’t hear him right. 

“There are other cyborgs out there that could benefit from this. Miller, Octavia, _you_ could benefit from this if you catch it.”

Her eyes are saying he’s crazy, but his gut is telling him this is right.

He grabs two of the three cases of antidote, enough to help a lot of cyborgs, and just as many packs of syringes. And the whole time, Raven watches him wordlessly. 

He hands her the packs of syringes, which she takes while meeting his eyes with a silent question.

“We can save a lot of people, Raven.”

One blink of her eyes, and her determination is back with a firm nod of her head. 

They leave the room, Raven hitting the locking mechanism before they’re rushing down the halls to exit the way they came without issue.

They make it past the fence where they abandon the scrubs and race back to the motorcycle and store the extra vials and syringes in their backpacks.

Murphy’s just turning to say they need to get going when Raven’s slamming into him with a laugh, wrapping her arms around him in a tight embrace. “We _did it_.” She whispers breathlessly as he holds her upright.

Murphy finds himself laughing too. “We’re not quite there yet,” he tells her. “They’re going to notice the stock depletion. We need to get out of here before that happens.”

Raven lets go and steps back, nodding, even as she continues smiling at him. She’s back to business as they mount the motorcycle and carefully secure the precious cargo.

And because they really were just badasses who pulled off the impossible, when they’re flying down the empty road and there’s nobody around them in the dead of night, Murphy lets go of Raven to spread his arms wide to scream his victory cry into the night with Raven laughing at him the entire way.

* * *

The rush of urgency and adrenaline fuels them through a nonstop ride back to the village, neither one of them wanting to stop when the antidote for Clarke is right in the palm of their hands – or in this case, Raven’s metallic calf.

They drive through the night and all of the next day, returning to the hideout just as the sun is starting to set.

Miller and Octavia race down the stairs as soon as they hear the motorcycle, both of them radiating nervous energy as they stand there watching Murphy and Raven disembark.

“Well?” Miller asks eagerly.

Octavia starts in right after him. “Clarke’s getting worse.”

Murphy watches as Raven pulls off her helmet, shaking her hair out in a way Murphy should not find attractive before looking at the other two cyborgs. A smile stretches across her face. “We got it.”

Octavia barrels into Raven. Miller follows behind her with a deliriously relieved laugh of his own.

Murphy watches as they all laugh and hug, Raven’s eyes meeting his through the entangled arms and bodies. She’s still smiling. 

Octavia follows her line of sight and rolls her eyes when they fall on Murphy. “Don’t be shy Murphy,” she tells him while stretching out a gloved hand to yank him into the hug. “There’s enough room for you too.”

Murphy grunts in protest, even as he lets Octavia tug him in, allowing them to wrap him up in the massive hug.

He’s surprised to find his throat tightening with emotion.

* * *

Clarke gets the antidote immediately, and from what Murphy can tell, just in time too.

It’s well past midnight by the time the excitement and relief has wound down, and Raven drags Murphy outside to sit on the ledge, hoping against all hope that the damn thing doesn’t collapse.

She’s quiet as she sits next to him, staring up at the stars. 

Murphy knows he’s staring, knows that she knows he’s staring, but he can’t stop.

“This wouldn’t have been possible without you,” she says softly, tilting her head where it’s leaning against the door.

Murphy shrugs it off, turning his head to look up at the sky. “You would’ve found a way,” he assures her.

He’s still looking up at the sky when he feels her hand reach over and grab one of his, pulling his attention back to her. She’s looking at him with the softest smile on her face. “I’m serious Murphy. Clarke wouldn’t have made it without your help. _And_ we have supplies I can get to Sinclair to help a lot more people because of you.” Her voice is firm with conviction, as if she knows he won’t believe it for himself. 

She squeezes his hand, sending warmth shooting up his arm.

Murphy opens his mouth to respond, but nothing comes out. He clears his throat against the emotion coursing through him, dipping his head. “Well I’m happy to be of service.”

At that Raven snorts, shaking her head ruefully. “Just take the compliment.” She tilts her head towards him, and when Murphy lifts his head back up with a sarcastic response ready, he’s startled to find how close her face is to his.

There’s a heated pause as they stare into each other’s eyes, as he watches Raven’s dip down to his lips.

It would be so simple for Murphy to lean in, to close the sliver of distance between them. 

But something inside him won’t let him, knows he can’t have this. They’ll all be gone before he knows it, and he’ll still be here.

He leans back, heart aching as he watches Raven’s face fall. She clears her own throat, releasing his hand and tucking it into her lap as she looks at the ground in front of them. 

This silence is deafening.

“I should probably head out,” Murphy says, voice thick with words he can't say. 

Raven nods at his words as he moves to stand, only looking at him when he lingers at the top step. 

“Thanks again, Murphy,” she tells him sincerely, even if her voice is more restrained than before as she looks up at him sadly. 

Murphy knows his smile is just as sad as he nods at her. He can’t help but feel the unsaid goodbye in her tone. “Anytime, Reyes.”

He watches her for just a moment more before turning away, knowing she’ll be gone by morning.

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this fic is also pulled from a quote in _Cinder_ :  
> "I'm sure I'll feel much more grateful when I find a guy who thinks complex wiring in a girl is a turn-on."
> 
> (A/N: I think Murphy does.)


End file.
